Complex
by Saro
Summary: Itachi reflection. No pairings. Itachi thinks he loved his mother once, if he thinks of it at all, which is rarely.


**Warnings:** ...I don't know. Itachi's POV? And it goes some sort of bizarre, crazy places. But it's Itachi's POV, right? So what else do you expect, really.

**Complex**

Itachi thinks he loved his mother once, if he thinks of it at all, which is rarely. He remembers her, her softness, her warmth, her body hunched slightly at the sink, eyes lowered humbly as she disagreed with his father in her reasonable voice, or wrist against his forehead and brows drawn at the threat of a fever; then, he's not sure. Love is such a difficult word, at once too vague and too evocative for him to be sure of its use. Especially with so much time widening the gap between him and the boy who might have felt something at the sight and touch and feel of her, at the smell of her, drifting to him through the haze of time, still that mix of soap, powder, something else--elusive--like the scent of sun on a woman's hair. He was a son once, so he supposes he can trust the memory that he loved her then. Once.

He remembers her with blood on her fine, soft white hands, and he knows he did, the memory coming back sharp under his breast bone like a phantom pain.

When Itachi was very young, he had not believed his mother was a jounin. Perhaps, he thought, and he might have smiled an indulgent, contemptuous sort of child's smile. That smile that meant he was humoring an adult. Perhaps she had been a jounin once. And now, now she was a mother.

But mostly, he just didn't believe it. There was a disconnect between his teachers and her, his father and her, his cousins and her. There was something they all had--or maybe something they lacked--that she didn't. Not even the kunoichi he'd met were like her. His lips curl slightly at the thought, as close as he'll come to laughing with Kisame sitting nearby. No, especially not the kunoichi. Some of them were as flinty eyed as any shinobi. His mother was never, ever like them. It only followed that if she was not like them, then she was not like them. Not a jounin. Not a killer.

His mother was pregnant with Sasuke, her belly not yet distended to the point of grotesquely fascinating to his boy's mind, but visible enough that he'd steal glances at it from time to time from the corner of his eye, curious, and imagining how it must feel with a bit of morbid fantasy. And he was happy, he thinks, to be with her as they walked. It was still interesting to leave the village at that time, and there was always the threat of an attack, but his mother's mother lived outside the village, and they would brave it to see her. If he had not loved her as such, then he had still harbored some affection for her, and more importantly, she was his. He does remember that, and clearly.

They had made this visit before without incident, but this time was different. This time, the attack that he always planned for as they traveled (he never daydreamed) did come. Came, and ended, before he had time to respond.

Their attacker was not skilled, he came alone, and he died quickly, a pregnant woman's kunai in the side of his throat in a strike as fast as it was precise.

It must have been terribly ignoble for him, Itachi thinks.

He hadn't been able to see the warmth in his mother's eyes then. Sharks didn't have eyes that blank. Dolls didn't. The light in them was perfectly reptilian, cold and pitiless.

Jounin.

Even at the age of five, Itachi had been difficult to surprise. She cleaned the blood off her hands on a handkerchief. They didn't shake at all. Itachi's own trembled slightly, and then, then he did love her. But that was the first and last time he saw his mother slip into the headspace of a ninja and kill, and it was over so quickly. Too quickly to satisfy him.

He asked her, once, to teach him. She glanced at his father, smiled gently, and brushed his hair back from his forehead. And she refused. "Perhaps you should talk to Dad? He's busy," she said later, when she explained. She never explained with his father there. "But he would like it. It would mean a lot to him."

He didn't ask her again. Itachi learned his lessons quickly.

This one, though, he admits to himself, he did not learn accurately. Not at first. He understood with crystal clear certainty that the mother he had seen then, the mother who could kill, the mother he hadn't even known existed until then... didn't belong to him. But beyond that, his vision was still limited: he thought that it was his father who kept her. It didn't take him long to invent a story where it was Fugaku's fragile ego that made him hide his wife's potential away from the world--away from their son.

Itachi admits when he's only half right. He still suspects that there was an aspect of that in the dynamic of his parents relationship: a bit of insecurity that would not allow Fugaku to accept his wife was a strong fighter, an equal perhaps, and if that was there, then the weight of the whole clan's eyes on them both turned toward them for an example and watching for some flaw, would only compound it. The idea calls to mind metaphors, visions of broken bones, never healed right, never bearing the weight they should have again. Of stone that seems strong, but the sedentary layers are tilted, their compressive strength facing the wrong way, and vulnerable fissures exposing images of the poorly mended bone shattering under the right pressure--come from the right, push him back, bad leg, bad stone under the left foot; stone crumbles, and a shocked cry as the bad leg crumples with it.

Was his father's confidence like that? It's hard to say now, without the evidence, with only his memory to judge from, and the memory of a jealous six year old, watching his father as he watched the mother he allowed his sons to have play with their youngest on the floor. Her hands were so soft. Her eyes were so warm.

Itachi pictured the hard eyes, the dolls' eyes, safely hidden up his father's sleeve. When his father was nervous, or thoughtful, or reserved, and his hand stole inside his shirt, Itachi imagined that it was those eyes he was squeezing in his uncertain fist. Cool and black, uncaring as marbles in his palm.

Itachi kept these visions of his, each one of them carefully compartmentalized. He saved them for his father, for the night he killed him. He's not sure what he keeps them for now; perhaps some sort of sentimentality.

It was Shisui who helped Itachi see the truth, unintentional as it had been.

"Don't be so hard on them," the older Uchiha had said, somehow having guessed the source of the frustration Itachi was taking out on a bamboo target. He had been frustrating that way, somehow seeing down the lines of Itachi's hidden thoughts as though they were clear highways. Somehow spotting the ambushes that lay in wait for him. "Your father's more than just a father. He's the leader of a clan. He does what he has to, and your mom's a good sport about it. She grew up in the clan. She knows that what she does now is as important to the clan as any of the assassinations she pulled before they were married.

"He's head of the clan now. How would it look if he had a wife he couldn't control? We're not the Inuzuka."

Itachi went very quiet after that, considering. The more he thought of it, the more the constraints of the clan came into sharp relief, like razor wire circling them all, growing tighter and tighter, more and more dangerous the closer one drew to the center--to the head of the family.

He remembered the feeling then, almost able to feel the wire around his throat, at his wrists and fingertips, pulling like a puppet. He saved that image for his mother, to show her underneath it all that he understood. He understood, and he was angry, but he could forgive her. He was never certain if she did; that was a sad side effect of ending her misery. How could he let her live so disfigured, after all? On a mission, when someone could not be carried after they were wounded, when there was nothing but a long death waiting, they knew what to do--hit the liver, said an older team mate. Black blood. Nothing for it. Grim face, and the kunai left a grim smile as it cut her throat.

It was only a mercy. Something he had to do. Something he had to be strong enough to do. She would never get those eyes back, not even when he killed his father. She never turned them on him. In his mind's eye, they rolled across the floor, slipping loose from Fugaku's shirt when he fell to the floor.

Sasuke, though.

Sasuke was so like their mother. Is so like.

Their mother is his, will always be, but without those eyes. Even in death, his father had kept those from him. He had only fear, and tears, and still there, still when she looked at him, a sort of warmth.

Itachi will see, when Sasuke arrives, what kind of eyes he wears with their mother's soft, pretty face.

Fin


End file.
